Design Of Reliable Wireless Mesh Networks

Executive Summary

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) there is almost more than one path from any node to another. However, when taking into account Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, alternative paths may fail to re-route traffic in case of failures. In this paper, the authors present a scheme, called RMS (Reliability Measurement Scheme) that allows measuring the overall reliability of WMNs. More specifically, they consider probabilities of failures and they compute the impact of 1-failure based on a Multi-Commodity Network Flow (MCNF) model. RMS considers both node and link failures. All network nodes, including mesh clients, relays and gateways contribute to the overall reliability.